Why Can’t US Business Elites be Moderate Keynesians? The Issue is Power, not Economics

Abstract

Why can’t US business elites be moderate Keynesians, as at least a few important and well-organized US business leaders were from the early 1940s to the early 1970s? Why can’t they accept the usefulness of Keynesian economics, based on the evidence that supports it, including the economic history of the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s (Krugman, 2012)? A moderately Keynesian business elite might have helped ameliorate, even avert, the profound economic-political crisis that followed the collapse of bond and housing markets in 2007–2008 and was later exported, devastatingly, to Europe.